This article was written by Joanne O’Gorman and Laura Klebanow.
Business strategy and brand messaging are often developed in separate rooms. Then everyone wonders why the story doesn’t quite work.
“We need better messaging.”
It sounds like a straightforward request.
Rewrite the homepage. Tighten the value proposition. Develop an elevator pitch. Give the sales team language everyone can use. Find a clearer way to explain what the company does—preferably in one sentence, with room left over for every service, audience, differentiator and future ambition.
Easy.
Sometimes a company really does need better writing. Its business strategy is clear, its positioning is sound and its leaders agree on where the organization is going. The language simply needs work.
But sometimes “we need better messaging” is the first visible sign of a much bigger problem.
Ask a few questions and the assignment begins to change.
- Who is the most important customer? That depends on whom you ask.
- What does the company want to be known for? There are four answers, all marked “priority.”
- Where is the business going? Leadership is still deciding.
- What should the website communicate? Apparently, all of it.
At that point, the organization does not have a copy problem. It has several necessary conversations happening independently: the conversation about the business, the conversation about the market and the conversation about the future.
The convergence of those conversations is critical. Without it, messaging becomes an exercise in smoothing over unresolved questions rather than expressing a clear direction.
No amount of clever wordsmithing can resolve a decision the company has not made.
Don’t let your messaging say, “Hello, stranger,” to your business
Organizations often treat business strategy and brand storytelling as sequential activities.
First, leadership determines the strategy. Then marketing is brought in to communicate it.
In theory, that sounds efficient. In practice, marketing may receive a collection of priorities, aspirations and compromises and be asked to turn them into one clear, compelling message by Friday.
Preferably before lunch.
The problem is not that marketing needs more time to find the perfect words. The problem is that the process of finding those words often exposes unresolved business questions:
- Who are we really trying to reach?
- Which problem are we best equipped to solve?
- Where can we credibly differentiate?
- What do we want to be known for?
- What are we prepared to stop emphasizing?
- What does this direction require from the organization?
- Where are we going next?
- Why should anyone believe what we are claiming?
These are not merely messaging questions. They are questions about business direction, growth, organizational priorities and the future the company is trying to create.
When messaging is developed separately from those conversations, it can sound polished while remaining strangely disconnected from the business itself.
Your website says one thing. Sales tells another story. Leadership describes a more ambitious future. Employees are still operating from the last version of the strategy.
The messaging and the business may recognize each other’s names, but they are hardly close.
A strong brand strategy does more than improve communications. It brings the necessary conversations together and helps leaders make decisions.
Joanne: Start with the market, not the conference room
When I approach a positioning or messaging challenge, I want to understand how the organization’s internal view compares with what is actually happening in the market.
Technology companies know their products extremely well. They know the architecture, the capabilities, the technical distinctions and the 17 reasons their solution is different.
Their customers do not.
Customers encounter a website page, a LinkedIn post, a search result, a recommendation or a sales conversation. They are not studying the company’s organizational chart—or decoding a glossary of industry acronyms—before deciding whether its message is relevant. They want to know whether the organization understands their problem and can help solve it.
This is where technology messaging can go sideways.
We begin with what the company wants to say rather than what the audience is trying to understand. We organize the story around product categories, internal business units or technical features because that is how the organization sees itself.
Then we wonder why the audience does not immediately grasp the brilliance of it all.
One of my first questions is usually: Who do you believe the audience is—and who is actually paying attention?
Those are not always the same people.
I have seen this repeatedly when marketing complex technology. The audience is often initially framed around technical buyers and people who already understand the product or category. That is a logical place to begin, but it can also create an incomplete picture of value.
Some of the strongest insights often come from operators, customers and business users. They talk about the work: what needs to keep running, what is taking too long, where visibility breaks down, what creates risk and what they are ultimately trying to accomplish.
They may not use the industry’s preferred terminology. They do something more useful.
They make the value clear.
That experience has reinforced something I believe strongly: the people who understand a technology best are not always the people who understand its value best.
Technical experts explain how something works. Customers and operators often reveal why it matters.
Good positioning needs both.
My role is not to take whatever the market says and turn it into a slogan. Strategy still requires judgment. It means deciding which audience matters most, which problem the business can credibly own and which opportunities support the company’s larger direction.
But those decisions should be grounded in the market—not made entirely inside a conference room by people who already know what every acronym means.
Laura: Before telling the story, decide what the business believes
I often begin from the other direction.
I want to understand what the leaders are building, where they want to take the business and what they believe strongly enough to organize the company around.
That can be harder to answer than it sounds.
A founder may see several legitimate futures for the company. A leadership team may be pursuing multiple opportunities that point in slightly different directions. Everyone wants the message to remain flexible enough to accommodate what might happen next.
That instinct is understandable. No leader wants to publish a message in October that feels obsolete by February.
But flexibility without direction does not create a future-ready brand. It creates a vague one.
A company does not need to predict every future decision. It does need to decide what it is building toward now—and which convictions are durable enough to survive a change of plan.
The conversation cannot focus only on what the business is today. It must also address its vision for the future.
That vision is a powerful motivator of people. Employees want to understand what they are helping build. Customers want to know where the company is going. Partners and investors want to see ambition supported by a credible path forward.
A clear vision helps people see themselves in the future of the business. Without it, messaging may describe the company accurately but fail to inspire anyone to join it, stay with it or believe in what comes next.
That is where business judgment comes before storytelling.
The strongest narratives grow from real choices:
- This is the problem we believe matters.
- These are the people we are equipped to serve.
- This is the change we are helping create.
- This is what we do differently.
- This is where we are going.
- This is why the business deserves to exist.
Once those decisions are clear, the creative work has something solid to express.
The story can build understanding, trust and momentum. It can help employees see their role in the company’s direction. It can help customers understand why the offer matters. It can give partners, investors and future hires a reason to believe in what the organization is becoming.
But the story cannot make the choice for the business.
Messaging should express conviction. It should not be asked to manufacture it.
The messaging process did not create the disagreement
Leadership teams can discuss growth, innovation and customer focus in broad terms and appear completely aligned.
Then someone places a proposed headline on the screen.
Suddenly, things get specific.
- “That makes us sound too narrow.”
- “That isn’t the audience sales is pursuing.”
- “We’re moving away from that service.”
- “That service still produces most of our revenue.”
- “We need to emphasize innovation.”
- “Our customers hire us because of our experience.”
- “We should sound bolder.”
- “Can we say that?”
This is often the moment when people assume the messaging process has gone off track.
It has not.
The headline did not create the disagreement. It simply made the disagreement impossible to ignore.
That is one of the most valuable things a positioning and messaging process can do. It brings necessary conversations together and turns abstract alignment into specific choices.
- What will lead?
- What will support it?
- What belongs elsewhere?
- What is true today?
- What are we building toward?
- What can the company prove?
A skilled writer can make a sentence sound better. A strategic process helps the organization decide what the sentence must actually say.
A strong story must do business work
A company story is not successful simply because it is memorable, inspiring or beautifully written.
It should help the business accomplish something.
The story may need to:
- Support entry into a new market
- Clarify a repositioning
- Improve the sales conversation
- Build trust in a complex or unfamiliar offering
- Unite employees around organizational change
- Establish an executive’s authority
- Attract partners, talent or investment
- Give customers a reason to choose the company
The intended business outcome should shape the narrative.
If the company wants to reach operational decision-makers, its message must reflect their everyday reality. If it wants to expand beyond a founder-led identity, the story must make room for the organization around that founder. If it is entering a crowded market, the message must make a meaningful choice about differentiation.
Otherwise, the company may have a perfectly polished story that does not help anyone make a decision.
That is decoration, not strategy.
Two business perspectives make the work stronger
We are both business-minded strategists, but we often enter the conversation through different doors.
Joanne looks closely at the market: the audience, competitive environment, operational problem and path from attention to action.
Laura looks closely at the business: the founder’s ambition, leadership decisions, organizational readiness and narrative needed to move the company forward.
Joanne asks:
- Does the audience care?
- Is this how customers describe the problem?
- Are we leading with the technology instead of the outcome?
- Does this positioning create a meaningful difference in the market?
- Can sales and marketing actually use it?
Laura asks:
- Is this the business we are truly trying to build?
- What has leadership decided?
- Is the organization prepared to deliver on this promise?
- Does the story express a clear point of view?
- Can people see where the company is taking them?
These questions create productive tension.
A market opportunity is only valuable if the company is prepared to pursue it. A founder’s vision is only powerful if other people can understand why it matters. A differentiated story must be credible. A sound business strategy must be communicable.
The work becomes stronger when we test both sides:
Is the direction ambitious enough?
Is it believable?
Is the market asking for it?
Can the organization deliver it?
Does the story create possibility without getting ahead of the business?
And, occasionally: Are we trying to fit five business strategies into a seven-word headline?
Before rewriting the message, reconnect the conversations
If your organization is struggling to explain what it does, another round of edits may not be the answer.
Before reopening the document, bring the business, market, brand and future-focused conversations together.
Ask:
1. What business outcome does this message need to support?
2. Which audience matters most to that outcome?
3. What does that audience need to understand or believe?
4. What has leadership actually decided?
5. What problem can the company credibly own?
6. What future is the organization asking people to believe in?
7. What evidence supports the story?
8. What are we choosing not to say?
The final question is often the hardest.
Clarity requires exclusion. A strong message cannot carry every capability, audience, aspiration and internal priority with equal weight.
Something has to lead.
Choosing what leads is not merely a copywriting decision. It is a business decision expressed through brand positioning and communication.
Put your own messaging to the test
Is your messaging aligned with the business you have today and the future you are building—or are the two still exchanging awkward introductions?
Download the Show & Tell Messaging Field Guide and Worksheet to bring the right conversations together, identify where your message is losing clarity and begin building a story that supports where your business is going.
[Download the Messaging Field Guide and Worksheet]
Business strategy and storytelling should never be separate conversations.
They are two ways of answering the same fundamental questions:
Where are we going?
Why does it matter?
And how do we bring the right people with us?